BlackRock Purchase of Claymore ETFs - Do the Smart Thing Please!

Today's announcement that BlackRock will acquire Canadian ETF provider Claymore could be a good thing for BlackRock and for ETF investors, if some smart, and not dumb changes, ensue.

Claymore charges quite high MERs - about 0.5 % too high - for its ETFs in comparison to those of BMO Financial, iShares and Vanguard. The takeover is a great opportunity for BlackRock, which already owns iShares in Canada, to lower the Claymore MERs and bring them in line. This will attract more investors and not cannibalize its iShares ETFS. In the USA, similar fundamental RAFI-based ETFs (e.g. Invesco Powershares US broad market equity fund trading under symbol PRF) have expense ratios about 0.3% lower than Claymore's, though even that is too high.

Why would BlackRock not lose by lowering fees? Claymore's ETFs are considered to be actively managed (though I do not agree with this characterization, that's the dominant public perception), more an alternative to actively managed mutual funds than to traditional passive market-cap weighted index ETFs. Let BlackRock take on the mutual fund industry with a much more compelling price proposition. After all, Claymore's ETFs already have most of the attractive features of mutual funds - auto & free DRIP and Systematic Withdrawal, Pre-authorized chequing purchases.

The dumb strategy would be to leave Claymore as is, with continued stagnation, or to raise fees, a recipe for investor flight. Claymore's ETFs are being left in the dust. For instance, the flagship Canadian equity fund Canadian Fundamental Index ETF (CRQ) has only $218 million in assets despite being started 3 years before BMO's Dow Jones Canada Titans 60 Index ETF (ZCN), which has $604 million in assets.

TSX Market Darlings & Dogs in March 2011

It is always worthwhile to compare the iShares TSX S&P 60 Index ETF (XIU) with Claymore Canada's Fundamental Index (CRQ). CRQ selects and weights its constituents according to historical accounting data while XIU does so based on the market value of companies. As such, the comparison tells us which sectors are popular and where the market expects future excess profitability and growth will come from - i.e. when XIU has more weight in a company or sector than CRQ.

Here's what my comparison table below tells me:

• Dogs (in Red on the table): Financials are still unpopular (less weight in XIU than CRQ) as a sector and across the board company by company with one exception, the Royal Bank, whose weight in XIU is slightly more than in CRQ. CRQ's 13.5% greater weighting than XIU in Financials and its overall weighting of 45% in that sector makes it extremely dependent on it. Incredibly, CRQ's Financial weighting has even increased since my last comparison. Inklings of popularity amongst banks and insurance companies are beginning to glimmer as most of them have gone up slightly in their weight within XIU from last August to today. Even Manulife and Sunlife, though still way less weighted in XIU than CRQ, have become less doggy i.e. have gained a little ground within XIU.
• Darlings (in Green, naturally): Energy (as in petroleum) has not only maintained its popularity, it is continuing to rise in XIU, both relative to CRQ, where it was already a heftier component, and to past August within XIU. The biggies are Suncor, Canadian Natural Resources and Cenovus and they have all gotten bigger. They must be making more money than other sectors since they have gone up within CRQ too.
• Waning Darlings: The Materials sector is still a grossly over-weight in XIU compared to CRQ but some slimming has occurred. Gold companies Barrick Gold and Goldcorp both lost ground as did Potash Corp of Saskatechewan. By the end of the day, uranium producer Cameco (CCO) (not shown on the table as it is too low down the list) might be considerably less as a proportion of XIU (it is down c. 6% as of 11:30am). CRQ has less to lose that way as Cameco is only have the size within CRQ as it is within XIU.
• CRQ's sector weightings have evolved much more slowly than in XIU. None of CRQ's sectors has changed as much as the 1.5% increase in Energy's weight, or Materials' 1.2% drop, in XIU. Accounting profits, sales and the like do not change as rapidly as market expectations, or should I say, today, market panic.

The S&P TSX 60 Index vs Claymore Canadian Fundamental ETF and Active Stock Picking

Take a look at the holdings of the supposedly passive iShares S&P TSX 60 Index ETF (symbol: XIU) and you will not find a number of companies that I would expect to see based on the philosophy of not actively selecting stocks but simply mimicking the overall stock market according to relative market value or capitalisation. The description of XIU on the iShares website says "The Index is comprised of 60 of the largest (by market capitalization) and most liquid securities listed on the TSX ...". Go into GlobeInvestor, do a stock search of all common stocks, then sort by the handy Market Cap column heading, compare the top 60 there with the XIU holdings and you are in for a surprise.

Missing from XIU are no less than eight stocks listed on the TSX amongst the 60 largest by market cap according to GlobeInvestor as of close of business September 1st:

• Newmont Mining (symbol: NMC) in 13th spot by market cap
• Great West Lifeco (GWO) 18th,
• Power Financial (PWF) 28th
• Boliden AB (BLS) 29th
• Domtar Canada Paper (UFX - that's what GlobeInvestor says, though maybe it should be UFS) 32nd
• IGM Financial (IGM) 45th
• Ivanhoe Mines (IVN) 51st
• Fairfax Financial (FFH) 52nd

Why is this so? The main reason is found not on the iShares website but in the index provider Standard and Poors' Canadian Indices Index Methodology document which states this about the TSX 60 Index: "It has 60 constituents and represents Canadian large cap securities with a view to matching the sector balance of the S&P/TSX Composite Index." If S&P merely followed market cap for the top 60, there would be much heavier weight in the financial services sector stocks. The Composite Index is only 30% financial services so the 60 Index is artificially made to look like it.

That's why such small companies as Inmet Mining and Yellow Pages Income Fund, neither in even in the top 100 by market cap, show up in the 60 Index.

In contrast, another ETF which weights its stocks by size according to fundamental economic factors, the Claymore Canadian Fundamental Index ETF (symbol CRQ), has a substantially larger allocation to financial services - about 45% lately.

For an investor seeking to mirror the sector weighting of the overall Canadian economy, XIU comes closer than CRQ, since Financial services (including two other sectors - Real Estate and Management) make up only 20% of Canadian GDP (2008 figures - see Industry Canada data here).

The fact that CRQ's weighting scheme is based on actual historical accounting data, i.e. hard numbers, shows to what extent publicly-traded stocks in Canada are comprised of the financial industry. Private companies must thus make up a disproportionate share of other economic sectors. The Canadian public market is lop-sided.

For an investor seeking to go where the money is, or has been in the recent past, in terms of dividends, cash flow, sales and book equity, then CRQ comes closer than XIU since that is the basis on which CRQ picks stocks.

But to say that XIU is a totally passive fund, which therefore conforms best to an ideal, is not really true. XIU is not inherently superior to CRQ. Choosing XIU or CRQ comes down to which alternative investment strategy works best - XIU's strategy being based loosely on market cap (which in turn is based on the market's opinion of relative future value) and CRQ's based on past results being maintained in future. Which strategy works best is a matter of practical investigation.

Addendum
Just finished a chat with a very pleasant gentleman at S&P Canada who said that the financial companies in the above list were indeed excluded to keep the financial sector weight in line with the TSX Composite Index. Three others - Newmont, Boliden and Domtar - are not Canadian companies, a criteria which also forms part of the index composition. The last, Ivanhoe, has too small a float. iShares needs to improve its inaccurate summary description to include the fact that aligning to Composite sector weights is a criteria and that only Canadian registered companies, not merely TSX-listed companies, are included in the S&P TSX 60 / XIU.

The Myth that ETFs are Always and Necessarily Better than Mutual Funds

It's all about costs and investment strategy. Whether a fund is an ETF or a mutual fund doesn't matter all that much. If the costs to buy into, to manage and to run the fund are low and it passively invests in a broad market index, the results for the retail individual investor will be good. The fact that mutual fund fees in Canada have been high and net investor returns have been low as a consequence does not mean it has to be so. In fact, ETFs are catching up to mutual funds in both good and bad ways. The recent proliferation of new ETFs with active trading strategies, narrow asset groupings and leveraging, foretell that investor returns will be poor.

That it is possible for mutual funds to equal the original virtues of ETFs is evident at the US fund company Vanguard, which offers both ETFs and mutual funds.

Here is a sample of funds with identical holdings and thus returns, apart from fees. In fact, the ETFs of Vanguard are merely a share class of the same asset base.

• US Total Stock Market ETF (symbol: VTI) - MER 0.09%
• US Total Stock Market Index Fund (VTSMX) - MER 0.18% no purchase or redemption fee

• US total Bond Market ETF (BND) - MER 0.14%
• US Total Bond Market Index Fund (VBMFX) - MER 0.22% no purchase or redemption fee

• Emerging Markets ETF (VWO) - MER 0.27%
• Emerging Markets Fund (VEIEX) - MER 0.39% plus purchase fee 0.50% and redemption fee 0.25%

The mutual fund on-going MER fees are a bit higher but for someone trying to make regular small purchases through an automatic savings and investment plan, avoiding the payment of trading commissions on ETFs, even when they are $1o per trade from a discount broker (a $10 cost on a $1000 purchase is a 1% "fee") makes the two alternatives very similar. Add in the convenience of automatic dividend reinvesting (DRIP) and tax record keeping that mutual funds offer, and ETFs lose their advantage. Vanguard even has a handy ETF vs mutual fund calculator to compare which version you would be better off to buy, considering fees, holding period, frequency and amount of purchases and commission costs.

The big problem for Canadians, of course, is that Canadians are not allowed to buy US mutual funds.

To its credit, one Canadian ETF provider - Claymore Canada - has adopted useful mutual fund features by offering pre-authorized chequing contributions (PACC) for buying its ETFs, along with a DRIP and a systematic withdrawal plan (SWP), all at no transaction cost. And all of BMO'sETF family new offer DRIP as an option, though not the PACC and SWP (yet?).

If only some mutual fund visionary in Canada would catch up to good aspects of ETFs ....

Claymore PACC DRIP SWP - Beware of the Broker

One of the valuable features of Claymore Canada's ETFs is that the company offers investors three automatic programs, all on a voluntary basis without commissions or fees:

• PACC - Pre-Authorized Chequing Contributions - owners of ETFs can make regular monthly, quarterly or annual purchases of additional units
  
• DRIP - Dividend Re-Investment Plan - ETF distributions received are used to buy more units
• SWP - Systematic Withdrawal Plan - ETF units held may be sold on a regular monthly, quarterly or annual schedule

However, there is a catch. The broker at which the ETF units are held must cooperate with Claymore to make it happen. Not all brokers do and some only participate in one or two of the programs. The PACC is the one with the most brokers missing. Unfortunately, it is also the case that the major bank brokers are least on board - none supports all three programs. To check your own broker, here is the list posted by Claymore of which broker supports what.

Thanks to Larry MacDonald at Canadian Business for asking the question that prompted me to look into this. You learn something every day.

Is Claymore Being Sneaky about Showing Fees on Its ETFs?

In looking through Claymore Canada's website, one comes across the curious fact that there seem to be two sets of numbers for the management expenses of the various ETFs.

The first number is the one visible on the website's description for each fund, e.g. the Canadian Fundamental Value Index Fund (TSX: CRQ) says the fund's "Management Fees" are 0.65%. (The other fundamental equity index funds - International, US and Japan have the same annual fee.)

The second number appears on page 19 in the Prospectus. CRQ in 2008 had a "Management Expense Ratio" (MER) of 0.70% in 2008 and 0.69% in 2007.

The difference between the Management Fee and the MER is not directly explained but it seems to be that the MER also includes other costs (i.e. MER = Management Fee + Other Expenses). Page 18 of the Prospectus says such expenses come directly out of the fund and they include: "... expenses related to the implementation and on-going operation of an independent review committee under NI 81-107, brokerage expenses and commissions, income taxes and withholding taxes, transaction costs incurred by the Custodian and extraordinary expenses."

Maybe there is a cap on fees to limit what comes out of the fund, which is what it actually costs a Claymore investor, but I could not find this stated anywhere in the Prospectus. It is the MER that counts to the investor and Claymore should post the MER front and center on the ETF's webpage. Better yet, they should do as iShares does (see the iShares Prospectus e.g. page 23 last paragraph) and simply cap the fees.

The danger of Claymore's approach is the confusion evident over at Morningstar, where the CRQ Management Fee has been relabelled the MER).

The same problem applies to the other Fundamental Equity Funds:

• Japan - 2008 MER 0.80% vs Management Fee 0.65%
  
• US (Hedged) - 2008 MER 0.82% vs Management Fee 0.65%

Then there is a strange one

• International (TSX: CIE) - 2008 MER 0.56% ... but Claymore charges 0.65%? Huh? How can it be that the investor pays less than the Management Fee charged, which doesn't even include all expenses?

It doesn't seem to be a typo since the 2007 MER was 0.53%. Maybe it is due to the use of derivatives to substitute for directly investing in the 1000 companies of the target index. The fund is tiny at about $51 million in assets so could not hope to buy 1000 different stocks. Maybe it has to do with the fact that the two main holdings of CIE are the Claymore Japan and Canada ETFs. Dunno, any theories would be welcome.

Update ... on page 36 of the Prospectus, Claymore says that when funds like CIE hold other Claymore ETFs within them, it is bound by securities regulations not charge management fees twice. If they excluded the fees charged within the Japan and Canada funds - about a quarter of the holdings - from the calculation of CIE's expenses, that would lower CIE's fees by about a quarter. Adding back that missing quarter (0.56%/0.75 = 0.74%) would bring CIE's MER up to around the same level as the other funds.

Claymore's Emerging Markets ETF (TSX:CWO) - Good and Bad Points

About a month and a half ago, Claymore Canada announced the launch of a new ETF with broad emerging markets equity exposure sold on the TSX under symbol CWO. At the time, Canadian Capitalist posted a brief assessment and so did his readers with excellent comments. With due recognition to CC, here is my summary, along with some extra bits on the currency hedging method used by CWO (my analysis) and investor costs (input from Som Seif, President of Claymore, who was kind enough to respond to my email enquiry).

The Good:

• broad emerging markets exposure in a Canadian ETF - this is a new thing, though Canadians could have bought Vanguard's emerging markets fund in the US (NYSE: VWO), which is in fact the same thing since CWO's holdings consist 100% of VWO
• fund is Canadian domiciled, i.e. is a Canadian not a US security, for US tax purposes, which prevents this fund from being subject to US estate taxes for high net worth investors - those with estates of more than c.USD$3.5 million (I wish!) according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers' U.S. Estate Tax Exposure for Canadians (updated April 2009)
  
• MER of 0.65% is reasonable considering trading and currency transaction fees, especially those doing regular rebalancing and using a broker who won't allow wash trades or USD in a registered account. Som Seif sent this comparison of a Canadian buying VWO and holding it three years:

  When you buy and sell, you pay 1-1.5% exchange rate spread.
  
  So, cost to you for buying and then holding for 3 yrs is 1%+3x25bps+1%=2.75%. That's 90bps a year.
  
  If you do any trading in between the 3 yrs for rebalancing, the cost goes up even more.

The Bad

• currency hedging in CWO is CAD vs the USD not CAD vs the various currencies of the emerging markets countries starting with India (19% of the portfolio), Brazil (15%), Korea (12%) etc. What Claymore does is called proxy hedging - the USD is used as a proxy / replacement for the basket of CWO's currencies on the supposition that as goes the USD, so goes the basket. The reason for doing proxy hedging is that few world currencies are liquid enough to easily and cheaply hedge. Som Seif says it works, but being ever the skeptic, I took a closer look, using the top ten countries which comprise 90% of CWO as my sample. My simple analysis in the chart below suggests that over the last 1-year and 3-year periods, the USD and the CWO currencies have not gone up and down together against the CAD. In fact, the CWO currencies as a whole have hardly changed at all vs the CAD, suggesting that hedging isn't necessary at all! Individual currencies have had big shifts but they have almost completely cancelled each other out. Meanwhile the USD has had much larger swings. Granted, this is a short time period so CAD might gain against the emerging world for the next twenty years, and reduce the CAD value of those foreign holdings as a result, which would make hedging worthwhile. But hedging USD vs CAD seems to be a poor way to hedge VWO. CWO's tracking errors against the MSCI index it is supposed to mirror are likely to be very large.
  

Great News from Claymore for ETF Investors

It is wonderful to read in an article by Rob Carrick in the Globe and Mail that Claymore Canada will be offering investors in its ETFs the possibility to do three things previously missing and which in my opinion add significant value:

1. Pre-Authorized Cash Contribution (PACC) plan to make regular monthly, quarterly or annual purchases of new shares
   
2. Dividend Reinvestment (DRIP) from existing holdings into new shares
3. Systematic Withdrawal Plan (SWP) to make regular withdrawals/sales of existing shares to generate cash

This considerably levels the playing field with mutual funds for small investors since all this will be done without charge - Free! The smaller the amount you have to invest the bigger the relative benefit since flat rate commissions at discount brokers would eat up more of small amounts to the point that it really did not make sense for trades of ETFs under $1000. The other big advantage is that one can put more of the mechanical part of investmenting on auto-pilot.

The article says Barclays, creator of the more popular market dominating iShares, is considering doing something similar. Yes, Please! That would really help force the mutual fund industry to lower its fees.

Questrade and Qtrade also lose a competitive differentiator. Their DRIP service would become un-necessary if iShares follows suit.

Comparison of Canadian Growth Portfolio ETFs from Claymore and iShares: XGR vs CBN, Which is Better?

A few days ago I posted about iShares new Portfolio ETF funds, stating my opinion that the XGR iShares Growth Core Builder Fund is reasonably good. There is existing competition for this fund in the one-stop shopping growth fund space in the form another ETF from Claymore, the CBN Balanced Growth CorePortfolio ETF.

I decided to have a look inside, do a comparison, see which is better and whether either is a great product that you and I should rush to buy now.

The Scorecard - my bottom line opinion summarized for those who want it all now

The winner by a narrow margin is XGR with 70 points out of 100, while CBN has 64. Call me a tough marker but that's a passing grade for both, not a fund-of-the-year score. Unlike most schools, in the right-most column, I dare to say exactly for what I would have given a perfect 10 (and I would be interested to hear other opinions too!).

Some Details
CBN's expense ratio is the sum of its own 0.25% plus that of the funds inside, which I calculated as 0.55% using the proportions of the component holdings. It is interesting that Claymore actually uses four funds of its competitor iShares (IGT, XRE, XRB and XCB) to make up 15% of the portfolio fund. The MER statement is the one critical thing I noticed (is there more?) that is NOT up to date in the Prospectus page 65 and for which I penalized CBN. Unlike the web site summary page on CBN, the Prospectus still says the MER is 0.7% for everything including the Claymore subsidiary funds; this is what was changed on Nov.18.

Diversification is broader and better in the XGR contents when one looks at the constituent funds. For instance, XIC is the total TSX 300 fund within XGR while the CBN equivalent content is CRQ which only contains 69 companies (more or less parallel to XIU, which I consider to be a large cap fund, not the broad total market). The same situation exists with XGR's holding of EEM a broad emerging markets ETF while CBN contains CBQ, which is confined to BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China).

In addition, the equity market funds used by CBN follow the fundamental indexing approach for their weighting, as opposed to market-cap weighting of iShares' funds. Fundamental indexing used various accounting measures to select and overweight companies considered to be better value and it is an investment strategy that I slot (though it doesn't apply the limited price to book definition proven by the research) into a Value asset class and not a whole of market holding that the true passive investor seeks.

The too-large Bid/Ask spread and Premium/Discount to NAV are surely mostly the result of these two ETFs both being quite small (both are less than $10 million in assets) and thinly traded. If the funds got a lot bigger that disadvantage of both would decline but in the meantime it's not good for the investor.

XGR's vague investment policy statement, which as I said in my previous post, implies an active management approach that is likely not the way they will actually manage the fund. Still one must take note of what is written, caveat emptor.

With about half its holdings in fixed income XGR is more like a balanced fund than a growth fund. With 80% equity, CBN is just a little above the usual maximum of 75%- it is in the aggressive growth zone.

Book Review: The New Investment Frontier III by Howard Atkinson

This is the 3rd edition of Howard Atkinson's book on Exchange Traded Funds. The fact that a 3rd edition was published in 2005, following so quickly on the first edition of 2001 and the second in 2003, reflects the enormous growth and success of ETFs as a new investment vehicle. There's a good reason for that success and Atkinson, with writing assistance from financial journalist Donna Green, explains the what, who, why and how of ETFs with much practical detail, balance and thoroughness. This book is a detailed compendium of ETFs, tailored for Canadians through the inclusion of a great deal of pertinent and useful Canadian tax information, probably everything an individual investor could need or want to know.

The thorough treatment is accorded not just to the tax implications. The same completeness characterizes the rest of the book. The book begins with a brief explanation of what ETFs are and why index investing makes sense, why passive index ETFs offer better returns than actively managed mutual funds and even index mutual funds. It does a lot of comparison to mutual funds, especially useful since that is the alternative for most investors, and shows how ETFs are more tax efficient and lower cost than mutual funds. He demonstrates the tremendous negative effects that higher costs have on an investor's net return returns over the long run. The balance I mentioned above is evident in this section since Atkinson lists such advantages as mutual funds do have over ETFs - namely ability to invest small amounts on a regular basis, automatic dividend reinvestment, no trading commissions on purchases or sales (the term commissions excludes the onerous and pernicious deferred sales charges on many mutual funds) and the availability to obtain certificates to be able to use the fund holding as collateral. There is lots of explanation and discussion of the merits of different indexes that many ETFs track, very handy for making informed decisions about one's asset allocation choices.

Atkinson throughout the book names products, ticker symbols and companies, giving references and copious weblinks; it's a very practical book. Probably, it would be possible to amass through the Internet all the same information that's in this book. However, it would take a huge amount of time and effort. Some of the more arcane detail in the book - things like the effect of trading by institutional investors - comes from Atkinson's position as an industry insider. He works for, or did at the time of publication at least, Barclays Global Investors Canada, which offers many of the leading ETF products. However, it is worth saying that the book does not read like an infomercial for Barclays - all the competing ETFs and companies with their various flavours are reviewed in a factual manner.

One area in which I find Atkinson goes a bit over the top is the discussion of how ETFs are perfect for doing tilts, style weightings, sector rotations in a portfolio termed the Core and Satellite (pages 93 to 122) and then how ETFs can support those who like to do technical analysis (page 123). I think Atkinson knows better since he includes a note of caution that says those tactics really amount to market timing and he has put forth the evidence right at the beginning of the book of the book that market timing doesn't work. Just because ETFs can be (mis)used that way doesn't mean he should tell everyone how to misuse them. He even quotes John Bogle, founder of Vanguard Group, saying that ETFs are like giving investors a loaded shotgun. Yes, indeed! This part of the book is the explanation of how the shotgun can be used, instead of for hunting geese, ducks, or partridge, as it was designed to do, for blowing off your own financial foot. Effectiveness isn't always the test of whether you should be doing something. Atkinson isn't completely wrong - there are two tilts, justified by proper peer-reviewed financial research, that produce greater risk-adjusted returns. These are small capitalization and value (as defined by price/book value only) companies/equities, known as the Fama and French Three Factor Model (see this Wikipedia entry for a brief explanation and link to the scholarly research article). There may other tilts and it is possible that they are beneficial but they remain to be proven so the average investor is best to stay away.

The chapter on using ETFs with a financial advisor provides an excellent introduction to the alternative types of fee arrangements that are possible. It shows how ETFs enable a convergence of interests of the advisor who charges fees (instead of collecting commissions and trailer fees from fund companies) and of the investor. The fee-based relationship with ETF investments can save the investor money compared to mutual funds and provide more comprehensive advice to boot. This happy result is illustrated and explained with real examples of advisers citing hard numbers. Atkinson, however, says forthrightly that for total holdings of under $100,000 the investor is better off with a DIY approach or simply the famous Couch Potato Portfolio.

Quotes

• ''... some active managers do beat the market, sometimes even after costs, but the trick is to find them before they do it.'' before, not after, is indeed the key; manager out-performance does not typically last so you cannot reliably use the past good performance to pick the future winners
• ''The more you pay in management fees and expenses, the less you get in returns. Period. Always scrutinize MERs.''
• ''The capital gains distribution and consolidation confuses many investors and advisors.'' investors, ok, but advisers too? ... a good example arguing for mandatory formal training for advisers, n'est-ce pas?
  

The biggest negative of this book results from the passage of time and the inevitable hazard that information has become dated. The explosion of ETFs and similar new products such as Exchange Traded Notes (ETNs) has continued unabated. Of particular note to Canadian investors are:

• the exit of TD Asset Management from ETFs in March 2006 and replacement by the e-Series index mutual funds (which make a reasonable alternative to ETFs for investors with smaller portfolios)
• the entry of Claymore Investments Inc in September 2006 with a variety of rules-based such as fundamental weighted indices

My thanks to Mike at the publisher Insomniac Press for providing a free copy of the book to review.

I look forward to version four of this very useful book. Four and a half out of five stars.

You can buy it at Chapters.ca.